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Monday, April 1, 2002

REMEMBRANCE OF THOUGHTS PAST Canadian Thinkers Victorian, Tory and Grumpy

April 1, 2002,
Books in Canada

A Disciplined Intelligence:Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian EraA. B. McKillopMcGill-Queen's University PressISBN: 0-7735-2141-0

Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition,and the Challenge of Modernity, 1939-1970Philip MassolinUniversity of Toronto PressISBN: 0-8020-3509-4

Intellectual
history demands a precise grasp of the ideas under study and their
development and a judicious assessment of the extent to which they
reflect or influence their times. A clear focus is essential or
intellectual history becomes a blur.

Ideas
can have a history of their own. The deepest and most important
thinking may be eccentric and marginal in its time. Its influence may
come generations later. Its importance may be its truth rather than its
representativeness. The ideas that hold sway at any particular time
may be commonplaces best found in the popular media or political
speeches. What intellectuals write may be of secondary importance. In
Canada intellectuals have seldom been a major influence. Even when they
were famous, perhaps Marshall McLuhan was the most famous, their
significance was more as objects of national pride than in any impact
on the life of the country.

These two books open doors onto Canadian thinking in two periods in the past. They fail to shed much light on it.

Brian McKillop's A Disciplined Intelligence
is a seminal work. First published in 1979 it is now reissued with a
new introduction and an updated bibliography. At the time McKillop was
working on the thesis that became the book Carl Berger's The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914
(University of Toronto Press, 1970) was practically the only book on
the Canadian intellectual history shelf. It is still perhaps the best.
In his new introduction and bibliography McKillop is able to note
upwards of a dozen later books in the field, many directly influenced
by him.

McKillop
deals with little more than a handful of thinkers in Protestant
English Canada from roughly 1850 to 1920. Most were philosophy
professors. They were often also clergymen or scientists or both. By
the 1860's they were wrestling with the impact of Darwin. Before that
they seemed to have found a happy orthodoxy combining Protestant
theology, Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and William Paley's argument
from design, under which every new scientific discovery could be taken
as fresh evidence of God's ingenuity and benevolence.

It
is well to be reminded, when all public education is atheist, that
English Canada's universities at their foundation were all Christian
establishments. Their faculty were practically all British educated, if
not British born, and very often Scottish. Scottish Common Sense
Philosophy, though now reduced in the history of philosophy to a minor
school, was big in Britain.

McKillop
disparages it as little more than an ideology convenient for its
compatibility with Christian theology. He finds it guilty of dualism,
as if this were an elementary error now behind us. Dualism is a
perennial problem of philosophy. Many philosophers who claim to
overcome it have been accused of lapsing into it. Others who are
expressly dualist accommodate it in ways that seem to transcend it.

McKillop
gives the impression that universities were in the grip of a stifling
dogmatism like that of dialectical materialism in the old Soviet Bloc.
One would not suspect from McKillop that undergraduates at King's
College in Toronto in the 1840's were required to study Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, condemned by the Common Sense school as a wrong turning.

19th
century students were not free to pick and choose their courses as
students do now. They got prescribed doses of Christianity and
philosophy. Philosophy was probably more important to the tiny minority
of young people who went to university then than it is to the host of
young people who go to university now, among whom an even tinier
minority study philosophy. But 19th century students also studied
Classics, English and European literature, history, mathematics and the
sciences. Compared to today's conventional mix of political
correctness, trendy reading and lip service to critical thinking it was
probably quite a broadening curriculum.

McKillop
never studied philosophy, put off he says by a University of Manitoba
department interested only in Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer. For a book
catalogued under "philosophy" this might be a bit of a handicap. But A Disciplined Intelligence
is not a work of philosophy even if most of its subjects taught
philosophy. Its treatment of Common Sense Philosophy and Hegelian
idealism as transmitted by Edward Caird of Glasgow University to John
Watson and expounded by him for fifty years at Queen's University is
superficial. A little training in the precision and clarity of analytic
philosophy might have helped McKillop to bring the thought of his
subjects into better focus.

In a long review in Canadian Historical Review (June 1999) McKillop was harshly critical of Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History?
(Harper-Collins, 1998). He fairly argued that there is more to
Canadian history than politics and war. But if history is to include
conditions of domestic service and academic writing in Victorian Canada
it must still make the connection between these fields and the life of
the country. Rather obscurely the thought McKillop chronicles finally
issued in the Social Gospel, whose impact on the life of Canadians in
the early 20th century was important. But until that development the
place of Victorian thought in the life of the country is not explained.

In
neither of these books is it supposed that the ideas treated might
have any value in themselves. They are simply expressions of attitudes
and interests that rise up and fade away and can have now only a kind
of archaeological interest. For McKillop the ideas of his subjects are
simply the period attire of a continuing struggle to "to reach a modus
vivendi between intellectual inquiry and conventional wisdom, between
individual autonomy and the social good, between the myth of freedom
and the myth of concern.". The last antithesis is a patriotic borrowing
of language of Northrop Frye, which may have been useful in his own
writing but only adds to the vagueness of McKillop's.

A
source frequently relied on by McKillop is university addresses
consisting of edifying platitudes. Anyone who tried to understand what
goes on in universities today by reading the addresses of university
presidents would be in deep trouble.

The title of Philip Massolin's Canadian Intellectuals, the Tory Tradition, and the Challenge of Modernity,
1939-1970 promises a more precise subject and a more carefully
circumscribed period. There is a particular Canadian Tory tradition and
it has had some significant intellectual exponents. Unfortunately it is
a poor book, reworking a particularly pedestrian thesis. It is largely
clumsy paraphrases of a disparate selection of writers who are united
not in being Tory but in being grumpy. The platitudinous moaning about
the decline of culture and civilisation is tediously repetitive. The
same quotations recur in different chapters. Massolin writes badly and
pretentiously. He is almost comically fond of the verb "aver". There is
quite a lot of mundane university history, the amounts of government
grants, the political troubles of Frank Underhill, no Tory he.

Of
the writers dealt with only Donald Creighton, W. L. Morton and George
P. Grant can surely be called Tory. Harold Innis shared some of his
great friend Creighton's ideas but his important writings are too
idiosyncratic to bear any label. Northrop Frye was occasionally grumpy
about developments in the university but never a Tory. Marshall McLuhan
still less. He ended up a kind of post-modern guru. And what are
Walter Lippman and Malcolm Muggeridge doing in a book about the Tory
tradition in Canada?

Massolin
advances only two doubtful ideas of his own and then simply pronounces
the Tory Tradition dead. He suggests that the grumpiness he reports
was simply an interested reaction of arts professors to declining
relative salaries and prestige in the period he covers. He does not
make out the case that there was such a decline. He could not explain
by it anything specifically Tory when liberal and left-wing academics
were in the same boat. Moreover, declining salaries and prestige hardly
affected Vincent Massey, who is extensively quoted.

He
is on to something when he describes the co-option of the Tory
nationalist tradition by the left in the 1960's and after. But he
misses a key part of the phenomenon. It is itself an American
influence, the overflow of young America's reaction against its country
in the 1960's. Often American immigrants were the carriers of the new
nationalism.

The
Tories Massolin describes are all dead. The Tory Tradition is not
dead. It is simply obscured, as it has been for eighty years, under the
Liberal hegemony.

The
productivity of Canada's university presses is a mixed blessing.
Massolin's book will be an obstacle in the way of graduate students
required to read the literature. McKillop's book succeeds in exposing
some of the forgotten thinking of Victorian Canada. But McKillop's best
service has probably been in republishing some of the writings of
William Dawson LeSueur in A Critical Spirit: The Thought of William Dawson LeSueur
(McLelland And Stewart, 1972). We would do best to dig out what these
people wrote and read them ourselves with an open mind, believing their
ideas still have something to teach us. History is not progress. Dusty
tomes from the 19th have far better to offer us than John Ralston Saul
and Michael Ignatieff, both commended by McKillop in his introduction.